Optimized Cable Experience

I just thought I’d take a moment and share the experience I had with Optimized Cable Company. I was searching for a set of HDMI-DVI and DVI-DVI cables for two monitors and decided to try the products of Optimized Cable Company. I found their selection of cables to be of high quality and their prices to be competitive. What prompted me; however, to write about this was the excellent customer service they provided. So often we are quick to post and talk about our bad experiences and rarely do we share the positive experiences we have with companies.

The positive experience I had with Optimized Cable Company is one of those great experiences you rarely hear about. When I ordered my set of cables, which were delivered very quickly (I might add), I realized I had not paid close enough attention to the connectors. One of my monitors had an HDMI connector, while the other had DVI; however, both of my video cards had DVI connectors. When I realized my ordering error I promptly called them and explained my mistake and they said to just send them back the incorrect cable and they would promptly send me the correct cable, which was slightly more expensive than the one I originally ordered. They did an even exchange and I received the cable I intended to purchase at no additional cost to me or hassle.

Based on the quality of the cables I received, prompt delivery, and the ease of doing business with them. I will direct my future needs for cables to them and highly recommend them for all of your cable needs.

Thank you Optimized Cable Company!

Optimized Cable Company

http://www.optimization-world.com/

Linux and USB Hard Drive “fsck died with exit status 8”

I decided to setup an old AMD 1.7 GHz system I had as a BackupPC server to back up a few machines I have and experienced an issue with a USB 2.0 Hard Drive. I thought I’d share my situation in case someone else runs into a similar situation.

My BackupPC server has 2 internal IDE hard drives and an external USB 2.0 750 GB SATA hard drive, which is used to store the backups. After I had completed the installation of Ubuntu 9.04 Server edition and rebooted I received the following error during the file system checks.

Failed to open the device 'UUID=2b1da3c5-d190-47c9-8f39-760100368e2c' : No Such file or directory

fsck died with exit status 8

    ...fail!

* File system check failed.

A log is being saved in /var/log/fsck/checkfs if that location is writable.

Please repair the file system manually.

*  A maintenance shell will now be started.

CONTROL-D will terminate this shell and resume system boot.

After researching the error and trying various suggestions I realized that all I needed to do was exclude the external USB hard drive from having it’s file system checked during startup. I solved the issue by editing /etc/fstab and setting the entry for the USB hard drive’s PASS column to a 0, which essentially tells fsck to not check the file system.

Before:

# /var was on /dev/sdc1 during installation

UUID=2b1da3c5-d190-47c9-8f39-760100368e2c /var            reiserfs relatime       0       2

After:

# /var was on /dev/sdc1 during installation

UUID=2b1da3c5-d190-47c9-8f39-760100368e2c /var            reiserfs relatime       0       0

After this little modification to /etc/fstab, I rebooted and once the system came up, I manually mounted the device for my USB 2.0 hard drive as such and all was good.

sudo mount /dev/sdc1

By the way BackupPC setup and configuration can be a little challenging, so I recommend aside from the official documentation the following link, which I’ve found to still be relevant for both Debian and Ubuntu.

http://www.howtoforge.com/linux_backuppc

New Microsoft Charting Control

Microsoft recently released a much needed charting control for both Winforms and ASP.NET. Looking at the WebSamples Project the controls look very impressive and offer many charting types both in 2D and 3D such as Bar and Column Charts, Line Charts, Area Charts, Pie and Doughnut Charts, Point Charts, Range Charts, Circular Charts, Accumulation Charts, Data Distribution Charts, Price Change Financial Charts, Advanced Financial Charts, and Combinational Charts.

Congratulations to Microsoft for finally offering a nice set of free charting controls. You can read more and get the download links from ScottGu's Blog link below.

http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2008/11/24/new-asp-net-charting-control-lt-asp-chart-runat-quot-server-quot-gt.aspx

Embedding an image within an email

Not to long ago I remember seeing a post on the ASP.NET forums where someone had a need to embed an image within an email that they generated from their web application. I decided to put together a short sample that does just that. Using the code I'll provide you can embed an image within your email, so that when you open the email up with in Yahoo's Webmail client or any other Web based email client the image will be displayed in-line as opposed to being sent as an attachment. This code is just a sample and can be further improved, but it should get you started. I have verified that the image is embedded in-line when sent to GMail, Yahoo, and Hotmail.

Here is the Sample's HTML.

NOTE: Make sure to add the attribute ValidateRequest="false" to the Page Directive. This is so that you can embeded HTML into your email message. Also please beware that this will also allow for XSS via Javascript.

    <div>
<div>
<asp:Label ID="ToLabel" runat="server" Style="padding-left: 1.8em" Text="To:" />
<asp:TextBox ID="ToTextBox" runat="server" />
</div>
<div>
<asp:Label ID="FromLabel" runat="server" Style="padding-left: .8em" Text="From:" />
<asp:TextBox ID="FromTextBox" runat="server" />
</div>
<div>
<asp:Label ID="SubjectLabel" runat="server" Text="Subject:" />
<asp:TextBox ID="SubjectTextBox" runat="server" />
</div>
<div>
<asp:Label ID="BodyLabel" runat="server" Style="padding-left: .8em" Text="Body:" />
<asp:TextBox ID="BodyTextBox" runat="server" TextMode="MultiLine" Width="250px" Height="100px" />
<asp:Image ID="SelectedImage" runat="server" style="left: 200px; top: 200px;"
Height="100px" Width="100px" />
</div>
<div>
<br />
<asp:Button ID="SendButton" runat="server" Style="margin-left: 10em"
Text="Send" onclick="SendButton_Click" />
</div>
<div>
<br />
<div style="width: 550px; overflow: scroll; height: 100px;">
<asp:DataList ID="ImageDataList" runat="server" BackColor="White"
BorderColor="#CCCCCC" BorderStyle="None" BorderWidth="1px" CellPadding="4"
ForeColor="Black" GridLines="Horizontal" HorizontalAlign="Center"
RepeatDirection="Horizontal" Height="90px" Width="500px"
onitemcommand="ImageDataList_ItemCommand">
<FooterStyle BackColor="#CCCC99" ForeColor="Black" />
<SelectedItemStyle BackColor="#CC3333" Font-Bold="True" ForeColor="White" />
<HeaderStyle BackColor="#333333" Font-Bold="True" ForeColor="White" />
<ItemTemplate>
<asp:ImageButton ID="ProfileImageButton" runat="server"
ImageUrl='<%# Eval("FullName") %>' />
</ItemTemplate>
</asp:DataList>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<br />
<asp:Label ID="StatusLabel" runat="server" />

Here's the Sample's Code make sure to include the following namespaces.

using System.IO;
using System.Net;
using System.Net.Mail;

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!Page.IsPostBack)
{
StatusLabel.Visible = false;
DirectoryInfo dir = new DirectoryInfo(Server.MapPath("~/Images"));
int total = dir.GetFiles("*.jpg").Length;
if (total > 3)
{
ImageDataList.RepeatColumns = total + 1;
}

ImageDataList.DataSource = dir.GetFiles("*.jpg");
ImageDataList.DataBind();
}
}

protected void SendButton_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
NetworkCredential loginInfo = new NetworkCredential("username@gmail.com", "yourGMailPassword");
MailMessage msg = new MailMessage();
msg.To.Add(new MailAddress(Server.HtmlEncode(ToTextBox.Text)));
msg.From = new MailAddress(Server.HtmlEncode(FromTextBox.Text));
msg.Subject = Server.HtmlEncode(SubjectTextBox.Text);
msg.Body = BodyTextBox.Text;

AlternateView body = AlternateView.CreateAlternateViewFromString(msg.Subject + "<br /><br />" + msg.Body + "<br /><br /><img src=cid:profile />", null, "text/html");
try
{
LinkedResource profileImg = new LinkedResource(SelectedImage.ImageUrl);
profileImg.ContentId = "profile";
body.LinkedResources.Add(profileImg);
}
catch (ArgumentException argEx)
{
StatusLabel.Visible = true;
StatusLabel.Style.Add("color", "#CC0033");
StatusLabel.Text = "An image was not selected.";
return;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
StatusLabel.Visible = true;
StatusLabel.Style.Add("color", "#CC0033");
StatusLabel.Text = "The following error occurred: " + "<br /><br />" + ex.Message;
}

msg.AlternateViews.Add(body);
msg.IsBodyHtml = true;

SmtpClient client = new SmtpClient("smtp.gmail.com", 587);
client.EnableSsl = true;
client.UseDefaultCredentials = false;
client.Credentials = loginInfo;

try
{
client.Send(msg);
}
catch (SmtpException smtpEx)
{
StatusLabel.Visible = true;
StatusLabel.Style.Add("color", "#CC0033");
StatusLabel.Text = "The following error occurred: " + "<br /><br />" + smtpEx.Message;
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
StatusLabel.Visible = true;
StatusLabel.Style.Add("color", "#CC0033");
StatusLabel.Text = "The following error occurred: " + "<br /><br />" + ex.Message;
}

StatusLabel.Visible = true;
StatusLabel.Style.Add("color", "#009966");
StatusLabel.Text = "Email sent successfully.";
}

protected void ImageDataList_ItemCommand(object source, DataListCommandEventArgs e)
{
SelectedImage.ImageUrl = ((ImageButton)e.CommandSource).ImageUrl;
}

Recovering lost AJAX Control Toolkit Controls in VS2008

When using Visual Studio 2008 and you have the AJAX Control Toolkit installed you might have experienced that your AJAX Controls disappear from the Toolbox. If you right-click on a Tab in the Toolbox and select Show All, you'll see that the controls are still there; however, they are all greyed out. This happens when using Visual Studio 2008 and targeting .Net Framework 2.0 in both Web Application Projects and Web Sites. You can resolve this by doing the following for Web Applications and Web Sites.

Web Solutions:

1. Click Project.
2. Select ProjectName Properties.
3. Under Target Framework, change it from .NET Framework 2.0 to .NET Framework 3.5.
4. Click Save.

Web Sites:

1. Click Website.
2. Select Start Options.
3. Select Build and under Target Framework, change it from .NET Framework 2.0 to .NET Framework 3.5.
4. Click OK.

ASP.NET FileUpload Control Issue

I had an issue with file paths when using the ASP.NET 2.0 FileUpload Control that was giving me a fit for a little while. After some searching on Google, I gained a little more insight and discovered that if you use PostedFile that IE saves the file's complete path, which includes the path location of where the file was uploaded from in addition to the location you are saving files to on the server. If you use PostedFile with Firefox, Opera, or Safari, the file's complete path is trimmed to just the filename and the location you are saving files to on the server.

Instead of using for example:

string path = "/uploads/ + FileUpload1.PostedFile;

Use this:

string path = "/uploads/ + FileUpload1.Filename;

This will assign only the file's filename to the variable path, so if you are saving the paths of files in a database and upload files using IE the path will not also contain the location of the file on the client's machine as well as the location you are saving your files to on the server.

I had never used the FileUpload Control before until recently, so hopefully this will help anyone out using it for the first time.

Sending an Activation Email with ASP.NET 2.0 Expanded

I had a request to show an example that would build on my original "Sending an Activation Email with ASP.NET 2.0" to provide a user with a link to log them in. What follows shows how you can place a link on the final Account Details page that when clicked will take the user to a Login page with their username already pre-filled for them.

Activate.aspx

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true"  CodeFile="Activate.aspx.cs" Inherits="Activate" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>Activation Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<br />
<asp:Table ID="Table1" runat="server" CellPadding="1" CellSpacing="0" GridLines="Both" BorderStyle="Groove" BackColor="BlanchedAlmond" Caption="Account Information">
<asp:TableRow>
<asp:TableCell HorizontalAlign="Right" runat="server">Username:</asp:TableCell>
<asp:TableCell HorizontalAlign="Left" runat="server"><asp:Label ID="ActiviationNameLabel" runat="server" Style="position: static"></asp:Label></asp:TableCell>
</asp:TableRow>
<asp:TableRow>
<asp:TableCell HorizontalAlign="Right" runat="server">Account Created:</asp:TableCell>
<asp:TableCell HorizontalAlign="Left" runat="server"><asp:Label ID="ActivationCreationDateLabel" runat="server" Style="position: static"></asp:Label></asp:TableCell>
</asp:TableRow>
<asp:TableRow>
<asp:TableCell HorizontalAlign="Right" runat="server">Account Status:</asp:TableCell>
<asp:TableCell HorizontalAlign="Left" runat="server"><asp:Label ID="ActivationStatusLabel" runat="server" style="position: static"></asp:Label></asp:TableCell>
</asp:TableRow>
<asp:TableRow>
<asp:TableCell HorizontalAlign="Right" runat="server">
<br />
<asp:HyperLink ID="HyperLink1" runat="server" NavigateUrl="~/Login.aspx">Goto Login Page</asp:HyperLink>
</asp:TableCell>
</asp:TableRow>
</asp:Table>
</form>
</body>
</html>

Activate.aspx.cs

This updated code stores the username in a Session variable, so that it can be used to populate the Username field of the Login Control.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!Page.IsPostBack)
{
string userID = Request.QueryString["ID"];
Guid gd = new Guid(userID);
MembershipUser user = Membership.GetUser(gd);
user.IsApproved = true;
Roles.AddUserToRole(user.ToString(), "Power Users");
Membership.UpdateUser(user);
ActiviationNameLabel.Text = user.UserName;
ActivationCreationDateLabel.Text = user.CreationDate.ToShortDateString();
if (user.IsApproved)
{
ActivationStatusLabel.Text = "Active";
}
else
{
ActivationStatusLabel.Text = "Pending";
}

Session["UserName"] = user.UserName;
}
}

Login.aspx

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Login.aspx.cs" Inherits="Login" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>Login Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div style="text-align: center">
<asp:Login ID="Login1" runat="server" BackColor="#F7F6F3" BorderColor="#E6E2D8" BorderPadding="4" BorderStyle="Solid" BorderWidth="1px" Font-Names="Verdana" Font-Size="0.8em" ForeColor="#333333" DestinationPageUrl="~/Main.aspx">
<TextBoxStyle Font-Size="0.8em" />
<LoginButtonStyle BackColor="#FFFBFF" BorderColor="#CCCCCC" BorderStyle="Solid" BorderWidth="1px"
Font-Names="Verdana" Font-Size="0.8em" ForeColor="#284775" />
<InstructionTextStyle Font-Italic="True" ForeColor="Black" />
<TitleTextStyle BackColor="#5D7B9D" Font-Bold="True" Font-Size="0.9em" ForeColor="White" />
</asp:Login>
</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>

Login.aspx.cs

This simple Login page retrieves the user's Username from the session and assigns it to the Login controls UserName TextBox. It first checks to see if the session variable is null or empty if it is then the Login Control's UserName TextBox is left blank.

protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
if (!Page.IsPostBack)
{
if (!(String.IsNullOrEmpty((string)Session["UserName"])))
{
string username = Session["UserName"].ToString();
Login1.UserName = username;
}
else
{
Login1.UserName = string.Empty;
}
}
}

Main.aspx
Upon successful login the user is redirected to a simple welcome page called Main.aspx.

<%@ Page Language="C#" AutoEventWireup="true" CodeFile="Main.aspx.cs" Inherits="Main" %>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" >
<head runat="server">
<title>Main Website Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<form id="form1" runat="server">
<div>
<asp:LoginView ID="LoginView1" runat="server">
<LoggedInTemplate>
Welcome
<asp:LoginName ID="LoginName1" runat="server" />
!<br />
<br />
<asp:LoginStatus ID="LoginStatus1" runat="server" LogoutAction="RedirectToLoginPage"
LogoutPageUrl="~/Login.aspx" />
</LoggedInTemplate>
</asp:LoginView>
&nbsp;</div>
</form>
</body>
</html>